(2009; Madeo, Korean) You're not likely to anticipate the ending of this crime thriller from writer/director Bong Joon-ho (screenplay co-written with Eun-kyo Park and Wun-kyo Park), with its premise of a mother (Hye-ja Kim) willing to do anything to prove that her son is innocent of murder.

In what at first appears to be a goofy sequence of events, though a vein of ominous tension throbs, Yoon Do-joon, a slow-witted young man, in the company of two friends, one of whom is Jin-tae (Goo Jin), pursue a black Mercedes Benz 280 to the country-club golf course after Do-joon's nearly being struck in the street. While waiting for the golfers, Do-joon retrieves golf balls from a pond.

After Jin-tae and Do-joon are taken to the police station, following an altercation with four older men and a woman, Do-joon's mother comes for him. Overly protective of her son, who reacts violently when someone calls him "retard," the single mother, who sells herbs and performs unlicensed acupuncture on the side (explaining that a needle in the thigh relieves a knot constricting the heart), sleeps beside him in her bed.

In the evening Do-joon goes to the Manhattan Bar, gets drunk, flirts with Mina the female owner's daughter, flings a golf ball into the distance, and on his walk follows another girl before reaching his home. In the morning the girl, Moon Ah-jung, is found dead, her head smashed and body hanging over the edge of a roof.

The police, who haven't seen a murder in many years, investigate, discover evidence, and arrest Do-joon. Presented with the evidence (one of the golf balls he'd found and signed) and threatened, Do-joon signs a confession. His mother passes out leaflets proclaiming her son's innocence and attends Ah-jung's funeral where she's insulted and abused by female relations of the deceased, parentless girl, who had lived with her grandmother.

During a downpour, depressed and drenched, she purchases an umbrella from an elderly junk collector passing by in his cart. When an expensive lawyer drops the case after an interview with Do-jung (he later offers to help have Do-joon transferred to a mental hospital for four years rather than his serving a 15-year sentence in prison), she suspects Jin-tae, sneaking into his house and out (while he's sleeping with a girl), taking a golf club.

Confronted by Jin-tae in her own home, who demands a settlement of $5,000 for her trespassing and false accusation, she agrees to pay and breaks down sobbing; he then encourages her to find the real killer. While she's visiting her son at the jail, Do-joon accuses her of having tried to kill him when he was five with insect poison; he orders her never to come see him again.

She finds Ah-jung's girl friend, who tells her about Ah-jung's "pervert" cellphone (made silent for photographing) and the dead girl's alcoholic granny. Jin-tae helps her get information the hard way from two boys who were trying to obtain the pervert phone to avoid being blackmailed. The complex riddle has a cruel conclusion.

According to IMDb: "Because of phonetic differences between English and Korean, both 'Mother' and 'Murder' are spelled the same when translated to Korean characters. The movie title, 'Madeo,' is a play on this similarity, suggesting both 'Mother' and 'Murder.'"

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Copyright © 2011 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
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